In the contemporary world, there is an archival impulse at work that represents something palpable--an opportunity to provide a counter-collection, standing against the monumental history of the state. Such an impulse has resulted in new public archives, individual projects, digital archives (including digitization of old manuscripts, as well as collecting digitally-born information), fictitious archival projects, and collections of urban histories. This panel critiques historical information on the contemporary Middle East by engaging with independent archival projects that collect information currently under siege, in real time and place, as cultures change and are lost in conflict. Recent scholarship has taken the subject of the archive and investigated it as a cultural object in and of itself. From the Journal of Visual Culture to the Arab Studies Journal, both academic journals have dedicated their most recent issue on the archive. As Timothy Mitchell explains in Colonising Egypt, the practice of science and systems of ordering national standards are modern projects that enable governments to maintain discipline and surveillance. A cog in the colonial project, the science of documenting every political act reflected a "tendency of disciplinary mechanisms," as Michel Foucault has called these modern strategies of control "not to expect and dissipate as before, but to infiltrate, and colonise." Participants in the panel will discuss logic behind independent archives. How might they be engaging with the public and public institutions? Or how research that draws from the press and cultural ephemera rather than state documents and "official" archives tell a slightly different version of the story of modernism in twentieth century Egypt, for example. This panel will shed light on alternative appropriations of 'the archive' as a transformative site of knowledge production.